Farhad Manjoo, writing for PandoDaily:

[I]f you’re bullish about Facebook’s long-term future, you should be happy about [the lack of a first-day rise in their stock price]—Facebook now has more resources with which to fight Google and Apple, after all. But of course for most investors, the IPO wasn’t about the long term. If you bought shares on Day 1, you were almost certainly doing so because you expected a pop—and when you didn’t get your sugary popsicle, you whined.

Interesting piece, and Manjoo’s thinking makes a lot of sense.

I’m not sure that agree this means that there wasn’t a bubble, though. Zynga’s P/E ratio is currently 68 times 2013 estimates, which implied investors are pricing in astonishing growth. Facebook is similar, with a P/E of about 73, even after the post-IPO decline.

That said, I’m hopeful in a similar direction:

Not only are we likely to see fewer irrational IPO pops after Facebook, but—in a twist that has taken even Facebook’s critics by surprise—we might even see investors basing their decisions on a firm’s fundamentals.